I am reading… I hold a piece of paper, and lower my eyes to the text in my hands, or on the table/desk. I move my eyes from the left side of the white rectangle to the right side, then my head/eyes go back to the furthest left point of the second line and crosses to the right again. Some people also move their lips to help them decipher, but social norms do not encourage this behaviour.

Reading is first of all linear decoding. Conscious thinking is also a linear set of actions: from deciphering the words, meanings associated, processing the ideas checking them against my understanding of reality, judging them, and finally responding. Thinking has to be kept linear in this task, but very often, my thoughts wander.

English is read from left to right. As my eyes travel patiently through each line, my mind reads aloud the words on the page.

Although I am reading silently and alone, I hear a voice that reads to me and the text takes shape in my mind.

As my eyes move across this page of black symbols, they take shape in my mind through my reading voice. Meaning develops as my eyes move. I am taking symbols, letters, [that] represent sounds: they play out in my head… while at the same time become images until all else disappears from my consciousness and the page melts away and nothing but the idea remains.

My consciousness is that of a trained reader, with a particular background, particular abilities to decipher certain texts rather than others.

In essence, reading is like a gradual building up of a structure.

The solitary internal space is a mental library, and in this silence, the words are born. Reading is a very personal experience. Whether it be on the subway or in bed, the reader is always alone.

I am forming imaginative photographs of each description…

Reading is still, almost passive: only the mind is working. I’m inhaling language through my eyes. When I write I exhale with my pencil.

Reading in the now … sends my conscious experience to another place. When you’re focused and absorbing every word, something magical happens. It’s as if the external world is no longer immediately present, and your mind is opened to someone else’s thoughts. It’s amazing that we can share our inner conceptions of the world that we all share but experience uniquely.

This language is checked against my own knowledge of the language, of reality, my own ability to extract the most knowledge out of someone’s message.

I also hear the voice of the author, embedded in the text: his style, his word choice, his meaning, the line of his reasoning, which must necessarily imitate the lines my eyes are following. He, the sender and composer of the message, is communicating with me, the recipient. He is in the past while I am very much in the present, yet I awaken him in my present and presence.

Do I trust the text, the authority of the voice? Texts, we have been accustomed to think, create truths, but at university, we learn to doubt them.

My appreciation of the text transported me from the physical space of the classroom to middle earth: tunnel vision sets in and the world melts away. Black and white symbols become vibrant scenes through the passage from page to brain.

After I finish, I reel as if I was actually there, in the text, the “now” of the text.

I try to imagine myself as if I was an observer, standing in the actual scenery.

When I start to read, … I take a deep breath and focus … to prepare … my brain and heart.

There is a voice in my head that reads the text as my eyes zoom over the words. Someone with a deep and gentle voice à la Christopher Lee.

My lips are upturned in an amused smile…

I skip ahead, my eyes splashing through the sentences and absorbing the images of the ripples.

[W]ords themselves cease to be words and become images, sounds, smells and textures.

Reading in the now puts me directly in the moment since the narrator is using “you” as a pronoun to address me, the reader.

[With the second reading,] I was no longer creating the hobbit: I became the hobbit.

Writing

I hold the end of my pen between my index and pointer fingers while resting it on my thumb. When I write, I also hear it, and I take dictation… my fingers are busy, so it’s much more active than reading. Reading is receiving information from a sender (alive or dead), while writing is creating a response of my own formulation. It shows my limits.

I am speaking in my head… I am reading from my head and then spitting it out on paper…

I’m thinking and narrating the words to my hand through the interior monologue of the mind.

It is during the writing process that ideas that relate to the first spring up and desire to be written down. All those ideas want so badly to be to be part of the writing piece and want to connect with one another.… [they] fight for a spot on the page…. [when I’m writing] It is my voice [that] I can hear…

Reading makes one conscious of the persona of the author, writing makes one conscious of a potential reader (known or not).

It becomes a top priority to get my thoughts and ideas out as quickly as possible before I lose them.

I worry about whether I have the right answer.

A text necessarily exists before you can read it; the writing doesn’t: you generate it. I continue the chain, by reading his writing, and writing down my thoughts, which you are now reading.

When I read, I interiorize someone’s discourse, and when I write, I am making my thinking visible, exteriorizing it. It’s like breathing. Reading means taking written symbols into your mind; writing means putting down written symbols of your own.

Writing in the now flows from the tip of the mind to the tip of the pen.

Pen stroke. Pen stroke. Pen stroke. Think. Pen stroke. Pen stroke. Yearn for a keyboard.

My head is close to the page, my page is slanted, my pen moves quickly and I write.

Naturally, I write as if I’m telling a story.

The brain is fragmented but the pen rearranges it back to order

I usually avoid writing on paper to save trees.

I also imagined the narrator, heard the pace and cadence of [his] words.

I started writing on this part of the page without being told to do so, which suggests that much of what we interpret as the acts of reading and writing come from what was told to us throughout our education.

Writing in the now is essentially writing without a film over it…. When I write academic papers, it is revised several times from several eyes and loses my voice, my tone, and my passion. 🙁 When I write in the now, it’s all there.